“Brave? Brave?” the captain repeated with the air of someone considering a question for the first time. “A brave man,” he said after some thought, “is one who behaves as he ought to do.”
—“The Raid: A Volunteer’s Story,” 1852
It wasn’t exactly what you’d call the Summer of Love:
On the twelfth of June, [1812,] the forces of western Europe crossed the borders of Russia, and war began—that is, an event took place contrary to human reason and to the whole of human nature. Millions of people committed against each other such a countless number of villainies, deceptions, betrayals, thefts, forgeries and distributions of false banknotes, robberies, arson, and murder as the annals of all the law courts in the world could not assemble in whole centuries, and which, at that period of time, the people who committed them did not look upon as crimes. (603)
Yet amid descriptions of carnage, widespread burning and looting, and mass exodus from cities and villages, Tolstoy keeps readers’ attention equally focused on the private lives of individual characters, some of whom find themselves committing the most unexpected and irrational acts of goodness. There’s longtime Rostov family servant Mavra Kuzminishna, for instance, who gives a twenty-five-ruble note of her own to a stranger who shows up at the doorstep, saying he’s a relative of the count’s. Then there’s that unnamed Russian soldier on the corner of Ilyanka Street who, in the mayhem of the Moscow evacuation, steps outside his assigned duties to help an unknown pimple-faced shopkeeper protect his store from looters. And let’s not forget about that dark-eyed French soldier who helps rescue a three-year-old Russian girl separated from her parents amid the confusion. These are the random, uncelebrated acts of goodness that Tolstoy considered to be the real stories of heroism of that time—a lesson that Nikolai Rostov, whom we haven’t seen since his return to the regiment a year ago, following his extended leave in Otradnoe, is about to learn for himself.
A beloved squadron commander, confident and secure in his position in the regiment, the twenty-seven-year-old Nikolai has been enjoying the pleasures of inactive duty for some time now. He has no intention of submitting to his parents’ request that he come home once again to assist with family troubles, the most recent of which is Natasha’s mysterious and protracted illness, following the elopement fiasco. Nikolai isn’t about to leave the regiment at such a critical moment, only to get involved in that mess, not least because he never approved of the match between his sister and Prince Andrei in the first place.
Nevertheless, Nikolai can’t help thinking more and more of autumn in Otradnoe, with its mushroom-picking and hunting expeditions; winter, with its Christmastime celebrations; and, of course, the heartening promise of Sonya’s unwavering love. All of this “had opened up before him the prospect of quiet gentlemanly joys and a tranquility that he had not known before and which beckoned to him” (645). But “ ‘I would consider myself dishonorable not only before all my comrades, but also before my own self,’ ” he writes to Sonya, “ ‘if I were to prefer happiness to my duty and love for the fatherland. . . . Believe me, right after the war, if I am alive and you still love me, I will abandon everything and come flying to you, to press you forever to my ardent breast’ ” (645).
Doth the man not profess his love a bit too . . . forcefully? And might that not call attention to the possibility that Nikolai isn’t perhaps quite as clear about his feelings for his cousin Sonya as he believes himself to be? His mother has been imploring him for some time to forget about his adolescent promise to the poor, dowerless Sonya, and fall in love instead with a rich woman, someone who might even help dig the Rostovs out of their mounting financial troubles. Despite her best intentions, Nikolai’s mother certainly doesn’t help to clarify matters for him.
Even regimental life isn’t quite as simple as it once seemed. The young man who seven years ago bragged about his heroic exploits in the battle of Schöngrabern now listens with bemusement to the pompous tale of the double-mustached officer Zdrzhinsky about the recent exploits of General Raevsky, who, in a showy feat of supposed courage, has just led his two sons onto a dam under intense gunfire. This juicy story of valor is precisely the kind that Nikolai himself used to eat up as generously as he served it, but now hearing it only fills him with . . . shame.
Nikolai has seen enough of war to know that all such stories are distortions, if not outright fabrications of what really happens under fire. For one thing, he thinks to himself, battles are so chaotic that nobody but a few dozen men would have noticed Raevsky’s sons, not to mention the fact that the fate of the fatherland hardly depended on taking that particular dam anyway. So what was the point of Raevsky offering up such a grossly disproportionate sacrifice? “ ‘I wouldn’t lead my brother Petya into it, or even Ilyin [a young officer Nikolai has been mentoring], a nice boy but a stranger to me; I’d try to find some safe place to put him’ ” (647).
Nikolai is starting to think less like a cocky young fighter than like his own father, who back in 1805 had similar concerns about his eldest son’s departure for the front. And, like Count Rostov, who listened to Nikolai’s silly patriotic outbursts with a clenched lip, Nikolai knows as well that Zdrzhinsky’s story, drivel though it almost certainly is, “contributed to the glory of our arms, and therefore one had to make it seem that one did not doubt it” (647).
After a long July night of card playing and flirting with the plump German wife of the regiment doctor, Nikolai and his men receive news of a skirmish to take place the next morning in the nearby village of Ostrovna. The sun is just rising when they arrive at the battle site, where columns of French and Russian troops are already lined up, and the crackling of lazily exchanged gunfire can be heard. Later, as the battle begins to heat up, with bullets whizzing and whining past him, Nikolai can barely contain his joy. “[W]ith his keen hunter’s eye,” he spots French dragoons pursuing the Russian hussars, and watches “what was happening before him as if it was a hunting scene” (652). And with his hunter’s intuition, he knows that the moment to strike the unsuspecting French dragoons is now or never:
“Andrei Sevastyanych,” said Nikolai, “you know, we could crush them . . .”
“It would be a daring thing,” said the captain, “and in fact . . .” (653)
But Nikolai cuts the conversation short, spurs his horse, and charges. As the bullets whistle stirringly past him, that old, familiar thrill of the kill takes over. “He did it all as he did at the hunt, not thinking, not reflecting” (653). Nikolai gives free rein to his horse, and as soon as the disordered clump of French troops suddenly shifts directions and gallops away, he picks one out for himself and bears down on his target. As his own mount slams into the rump of the gray horse carrying his intended prey, Nikolai, “not knowing why himself, raised his saber and struck the Frenchman with it” (653). The Frenchman falls to the ground, not so much from the saber blow as from the equine collision and the horrors of the moment. Eagerly looking “to see whom he had vanquished” (653), Nikolai does something he’s never done before in battle. He stops. He looks. And this is what he sees:
Narrowing his eyes fearfully, as if expecting a new blow any second, [the French officer] winced, glancing up at Nikolai from below with an expression of terror. His face, pale and mud-spattered, fair-haired, young, with a dimple on the chin and light blue eyes, was not at all for the battlefield, not an enemy’s face, but a most simple, homelike face. (653)
What Nikolai sees, in other words, is a human being: a boy in his teens—the very same age as his own brother Petya, in fact, the same age as his protégé Ilyin.
On any other occasion, Nikolai would have been overjoyed by what happens next: Summoned by his commander, he is instructed that, rather than being punished for having attacked without being given orders to do so, he is to be recommended to the tsar for the St. George Cross. But something keeps troubling him. “ ‘Ilyin? No, he’s safe. Did I disgrace myself somehow? No, it’s not that!’ Something else tormented him, something like remorse. ‘Yes, yes, that French officer with the dimple. And I remember how my arm stopped as I raised it’ ” (654).
This nervy hussar who once blurted out at the dinner table that “ ‘the Russians must either die or conquer’ ” (64) has suddenly discovered yet another possibility he never considered before: that Russians can also feel compassion toward their enemies—a sense of charity that may well up every bit as powerfully and as suddenly as the instinct, in the heat of battle, to kill. Had Nikolai almost anticipated this sense of compassionate regret? He only grazed the young Frenchman, after all, where, had he plunged the saber in him with full force, he certainly would have killed him. For two days Nikolai is silent and pensive,
thinking about that brilliant feat of his, which, to his surprise, had gained him the St. George Cross and even given him the reputation of a brave man—and there was something in that he was unable to understand. “So they’re even more afraid than we are!” he thought. “So that’s all there is to so-called heroism? And did I really do it for the fatherland? And what harm had he done, with his dimple and his light blue eyes? But how frightened he was! He thought I’d kill him. Why should I kill him? My hand faltered. And they gave me the St. George Cross. I understand nothing, nothing!” (654)
But we understand perfectly well: his cherished ideas about what it means to be a hero, to defend the fatherland, to kill another person in battle, have just received a fatal blow. Nikolai has gone through similar moments of disillusionment before, of course—after being chided for calling out the purse thief Telyanin in front of other officers, for instance, or while nursing his wounds around the campfire after the battle of Schöngrabern, or while witnessing the disheartening treaty signing between Alexander and Napoleon in Tilsit. But if at Tilsit Nikolai buried his disappointment beneath drunken fist pounding on the canteen table, roaring at his comrades, “ ‘Our business is to do our duty, to cut and slash, not to think, that’s all’ ” (417), now, some five years later, he understands that there are also times when soldiers should refrain from cutting and slashing, take a moment to consider their actions—perhaps even make a split-second decision not to act at all. And that, for Nikolai, is a new paradigm altogether.
In the essay “Why Do Men Stupefy Themselves?,” published in 1890 as a preface to a book, Drunkenness, Tolstoy wrote:
[T]rue life begins where the tiny bit begins—where what seem to us minute and infinitely small alterations take place. True life is not lived where great external changes take place—where people move about, clash, fight, and slay one another—it is lived only where these tiny, tiny, infinitesimally small changes occur.
The fact that Tolstoy offers this wisdom in an essay about addiction is significant. For the strength one needs to overcome addiction is most clearly exhibited at the first moment of desire for the cigarette or the bottle. If you don’t resist in that second, you’ve had it. If Nikolai is something of a battle junkie, he overcomes his addiction to battlefield highs in the very second that he hesitates before plunging his saber into the chest of the young, dimple-chinned Frenchman. That, Tolstoy says, not the martial action it follows, is where courage resides. It is a pivotal step on the character’s journey of transformation from young heroism addict to authentically heroic human being. The man who used to think that to be courageous meant slaying Frenchmen in battle as unthinkingly as one might slay wolves on a hunt now realizes that compassion and self-restraint may be braver still.
So is Nikolai transforming into some kind of Christian moralist, a pacifist of the sort Tolstoy himself became in his later years? Not at all. Far from losing his responsiveness to life’s vital energies, Nikolai is actually gaining the capacity to channel them in richer and more nuanced ways than before. The difference between the battle at Ostrovna and the exhilaration he feels on the wolf hunt, for instance, or the ecstasy he experiences while listening to Natasha sing, is that Nikolai is now able to choose his response to those vital forces washing over him. In the singing scene, this happens only after the fact, when he settles back into reality and must decide how he’s going to tell his father about what’s happened. While in the hunting scene it occurs after the hunt is over and he is able to reflect calmly on the events of the day. In this scene, however, Nikolai chooses within the heat of battle, at the very moment when the thrill of the kill would seem to have him in its grip. He both feels the wild energy to which he’s so well attuned and harnesses it toward constructive, life-affirming ends.
Theologian Paul Tillich, writing in the mid-twentieth century, identifies this sort of integration of vitality with morality as one of the hallmarks of genuine courage. “Pure vitality in man,” writes Tillich in his celebrated The Courage to Be (1952), “is never pure but always distorted, because man’s power of life is his freedom and the spirituality in which vitality and intentionality are united.” But this sort of courage is rare—and never more so than during troubled times—as Tillich well knew. Living in Nazi Germany until he was extradited for his opposition to the regime in 1933, Tillich was intimately familiar with the ways in which pure vitality “can, if used by demagogues, produce the barbaric ideal of courage.” No stranger to demagoguery himself, Tolstoy gives us plenty of examples of this phenomenon in War and Peace.
We might compare Nikolai’s reaction to the blue-eyed French youth, for example, to Moscow governor Rostopchin’s treatment of the adolescent Russian political prisoner Vereshchagin a few weeks later. Vereshchagin is accused of disseminating pro-French pamphlets. Afraid that he might be losing control of his city and enraged that the decision to abandon the Russian capital was made without his consent, Rostopchin vents his frustration by inciting the crowd to beat Vereshchagin to death: “ ‘Beat him! . . . Let the traitor perish and not disgrace the Russian name!’ Rostopchin began shouting. ‘Cut him down! I order it!’ ” (889) The crowd, only too ready to oblige, roars wildly, kills the youth, and closes in over the bloody corpse. Rostopchin, chilled by the realization of what he’s just done, escapes by carriage, and makes a point of comforting himself with the thought that he did it for le bien public, “the public good” (893). This is, of course, nonsense, for he acted out of desperation, his will not just blocked but seemingly threatened. Yet in his frenzied attempt to maintain his grip on his rapidly dwindling power, Rostopchin gives up the one power he actually does have: to choose good on the spur of the moment rather than evil. And that is a power Nikolai Rostov, even in the heat of battle, does not relinquish.
A month after Ostrovna, just before the battle of Borodino, Nikolai is out for a ride not far from enemy lines, along with his orderly Lavrushka and Ilyin. Being a thoughtful squadron commander, Nikolai wants to take advantage of this brief window of opportunity before the French close in; he hopes to find provisions and maybe even some pretty girls for his ragged troops. But the outing unexpectedly becomes a mission of a very different sort when the swashbuckling military men happen upon the country estate of a wealthy aristocratic family in the town of Bogucharovo. There they find a terrified princess whose father has just died, and whose agitated peasants, wrongly believing that their mistress intends to abandon them to the French, have unharnessed her horses and refused to let her leave the estate. Little does Nikolai know that this estate belongs to the late Prince Bolkonsky, and that the woman being held against her will is none other than Princess Marya Bolkonskaya, sister of Natasha’s former fiancé, Prince Andrei.
“Yeah, right!” exclaims one student, skeptical of this unlikely encounter.
“Give me a break,” chimes another.
“Ah, ye of little faith!” I respond. “I mean, synchronicities like this do happen now and then, don’t they? You’re going about your life, and you run into a friend of a friend of a friend you haven’t seen for a long time, or you have a wildly unexpected encounter that has the potential to change the very course of your life. You may not know this at the time, of course, so the real question then becomes: How are you responding to each of these moments as they arise?”
Well, here’s how Nikolai responds. As soon as he registers the seriousness of the situation, he dismounts and bolts down the road to the manor house in order to check up on the princess, who, upon seeing his familiar Russian face and recognizing in him a man of her own circle, looks at her savior “with her deep, luminous gaze” that touches Nikolai (733). He immediately imagines something romantic in this strange encounter: “ ‘A defenseless, grief-stricken girl, alone, left to the mercy of coarse, mutinous muzhiks [peasants]! And what a strange fate has pushed me to come here!’ thought Nikolai, listening to her and looking at her. ‘And what meekness, what nobility in her features and expressions!’ he thought, listening to her timid account” (733).
His reaction is sure to evoke a smile in the reader. But should that smile cross over into an ironic, cynical smirk, as I have seen often enough, then the reader, well, has missed Tolstoy’s point entirely. “[D]o heroes see themselves acting as heroes?” wonders one slightly skeptical Slavic scholar about this scene. “[Nikolai’s] very self-consciousness carries with it something of the parodic.” Maybe so, yet whatever romantic explanation Nikolai might attempt to superimpose on his strange encounter with Princess Marya is less important to Tolstoy than his (and our) ability to recognize the power of the moment itself. The fact is, there is indeed something providential going on here, as we shall soon discover, and the sympathy each of these people feels for the other isn’t just romantic fluff. It’s quite real—as real, in fact, as the deep, luminous gaze that makes Nikolai forget the plainness of Marya’s face, or the tears that well up in his own eyes as soon as he learns that all of this has befallen the princess the day after her father’s death:
“I cannot express to you, Princess, how happy I am that I have come here accidentally and will be in a position to show you my readiness,” Nikolai said, getting up. “Go, please, and I will answer to you on my honor that not a single person will dare cause you any trouble, if only you will allow me to escort you,” and bowing respectfully, as one bows to a lady of royal blood, he went to the door. (733)
A bit over the top? Okay, sure. But the most interesting thing about this courtly encounter is how genuine the refinement in behavior actually is. In contrast to the aristocratic niceties, those less-than-sincere expressions of noblesse oblige thrown about by other high-society characters in so many of the novel’s drawing-room scenes, Nikolai’s fine sentiments here are fine indeed, and entirely genuine. By his respectful tone he communicates to Marya that, fortunate as he may consider himself to have made her acquaintance, he has no intention of exploiting her misfortune to become closer to her. Yet closeness, much to his own surprise, is exactly what he feels.
Leaving Marya, he heads back to the village, where he spends all of a millisecond debating his course of action. His first order of business is to find out who the headman of Princess Marya’s estate is. When the peasant Karp brazenly questions why Nikolai needs to know this, Nikolai responds with a right hook to Karp’s jaw, sending the peasant’s head flying sideways. His rage now at full throttle, Nikolai has the bruised and humbled peasant bound, an order that two other peasants are only too ready to oblige, removing their own belts in order to assist. Only then does the headman Dron finally step forward out of the crowd, his face pale and frowning. Suddenly, seeing the error of their ways, the peasants return to their homes; the rebellion is over. An hour later, they’re back at work, cheerfully loading their masters’ belongings onto carts. So what just happened?
It’s possible of course that the peasants were just bluffing. But it is equally likely that they recognize in Nikolai someone not unlike their deceased master, the old Prince Bolkonsky, who, for all his faults, possessed both firm resolve and moral clarity, two qualities badly needed in this chaotic time. Whatever their motivations, Nikolai manages to convince the peasants that with the enemy approaching, maybe now isn’t the best time to hold hostage their irreproachable and well-meaning mistress, who has just lost her father and is about to lose everything else if they all don’t get the hell out of there, and fast. Even before Nikolai’s fists start rolling, the head steward Alpatych and the other peasants sense that, whatever he’s about to do, it’s going to work:
Without considering what he was going to do, unconsciously, at a quick, resolute pace, he moved towards the crowd. And the closer he came to it, the more Alpatych felt that his unreasonable action might produce good results. The muzhiks [peasants] in the crowd had the same feeling, looking at his quick and firm stride and resolute, frowning face. (734)
Nikolai isn’t thinking about being a hero or savior, or even about what might come of his actions. He simply sees a young woman who needs help and a situation that needs to be rectified, and, putting his self-interest and fears aside, responds appropriately. These actions prove effective in a way that Tolstoy believed only uncalculated and spontaneous activity can be: “Only unconscious activity bears fruit,” Tolstoy writes a little bit later in the novel, “and a man who plays a role in an historical event never understands its significance. If he attempts to understand it, he is struck with fruitlessness” (944).
If Nikolai’s split-second decision not to act on the battlefield of Ostrovna, then, like his decision to act in Bogucharovo, is more effective and courageous than nearly anything else he’s done up to that point in the novel, it is precisely because he’s no longer trying to behave like the Hero. Which is precisely how any of us may be one. A hero in Tolstoy’s estimation is, more often than not, just an ordinary person who finds himself doing the extraordinary things demanded by the circumstances he happens to be in.
For a number of veterans of the war of 1812, this notion of heroism wasn’t, well, heroic enough. Prince Pyotr Vyazemsky, an influential cultural figure in the 1860s and a soldier in 1812, accused the author of War and Peace of being a nihilist, one of those “killers of history.” He and other veterans found the novel downright blasphemous in the way it lampoons the leaders of the Russian military operation, includes trivial and unnecessary details about officers’ daily lives, and depicts the war of 1812 as one giant conglomeration of circumstances beyond human planning or comprehension. Avraam Norov, a philologist and church historian in the 1860s who lost a leg as a young officer at Borodino, was particularly offended by Tolstoy’s portrait of Commander in Chief Kutuzov, who, on the eve of the battle of Borodino, immerses himself in a cheap French novel:
Before and after Borodino, all of us, from Kutuzov down to the last artillery lieutenant, like myself, burned with the same lofty and sacred fire of patriotism. We regarded our calling as some kind of a religious rite. I do not know how comrades-in-arms would treat someone who would have among his belongings a book for light-reading, especially a French one, such as a novel by Madame de Genlis.
Contemporary critic Nikolai Strakhov begged to differ, arguing that Tolstoy’s depiction of Russian heroism is, in fact, more inspiring than that of any number of soon-to-be forgotten “patriotic” writers of the time, because Tolstoy manages to create real characters, with real flaws, whom every reader can recognize, yet who nonetheless exhibit the “spark of heroism” in the most unlikely circumstances. Far from denigrating the strength and nobility of the Russian spirit, then, Tolstoy’s unflinching realism actually permits those qualities to “appear before us all the more powerfully and all the more truthfully.”
Needless to say, I’m with Strakhov, and would suggest that Nikolai’s actions at Bogucharovo are a good illustration of the point he is making. Clearly, Nikolai has some serious anger management issues, with a leadership style that isn’t apt to win him many friends. And yet he does manage to influence people, at a time in history when many of the most famous and celebrated Russian leaders, according to Tolstoy, have revealed themselves to be as arrogant as they are ineffective. Maybe, then, in order to be a Russian patriot, it isn’t really necessary to burn with the sacred fire of patriotism, to regard one’s soldierly duty as a kind of religious rite, or even to forgo the pleasures of light French novels on the eve of an important battle; perhaps it’s enough to be fully present to what is happening around you, and to respond with quiet strength and commitment to doing what’s right. Nikolai used to talk a lot about things like honor and duty and the fatherland, and always came off sounding pretty immature and self-righteous. Whereas at Bogucharovo he doesn’t do a lot of talking. He simply acts—bad temper, loose fists, and all—and winds up saving the life of the woman who will become his wife: an instance of unconscious activity that will quite literally bear fruit.
About a week after the episode at Bogucharovo, Nikolai is sent to Voronezh in order to remount the division. There he enjoys his status as mini-celebrity among the locals, and isn’t above a little inappropriate flirting with the sweet-looking, blue-eyed wife of a provincial official. Nikolai, in other words, is just being Nikolai. But guess who happens to be in Voronezh staying with her aunt at that very moment? Bingo.
When the governor’s wife offers to arrange a meeting between the dashing squadron commander and the princess he recently saved, Nikolai for some reason feels compelled to pour his heart out to this complete stranger. Confiding in her as he might in his own mother, he lets the self-designated matchmaker know that he has indeed taken a fancy to the princess, but could never marry her because of his long-standing promise to Sonya. Later on, he’ll berate himself for that “stupid whimsy” of a confession, and yet, as he will eventually come to understand, “this impulse of unprovoked candor, along with other small events, had enormous consequences for him and for the whole family” (949). To begin with, it provokes a strong reaction from the governor’s wife:
“Mon cher, mon cher, how can you reason that way? Sophie [Sonya] has nothing, and you said yourself that your father’s affairs are in disorder. And your maman? It will kill her, for one thing. Then Sophie, if she’s a girl with a heart, what sort of life will it be for her? The mother in despair, affairs in disorder . . . No, mon cher, you and Sophie ought to understand that.”
Nikolai was silent. It was pleasant for him to hear these conclusions. (950)
An odd reaction from a guy who’s had more than a few screaming matches with his mother on this very subject. But that was before the events of 1812, before Bogucharovo. The world is rapidly changing, and so is Nikolai. The remonstrations of the governor’s wife serve only to reinforce his growing intuition that there is something as faulty about his plans to marry Sonya as there is something inexplicably right about the closeness he feels toward Marya.
These realizations, dawning upon him during the several-weeks stay of his in Voronezh, become strikingly clear when he sees the princess praying during a church service in honor of the Russian troops. “[W]ithout asking himself whether or not it would be good or proper for him to address her there in church,” Nikolai strides up to Marya and expresses his sincere sympathy for her grief over her brother Andrei, about whose shrapnel wounds she only recently learned from the newspapers (954). And as Nikolai studies “[t]hat pale, fine, sorrowful face, that luminous gaze, those quiet, graceful movements, and above all that deep and tender sorrow which showed in all her features,” he is moved by the presence of a spiritual life utterly foreign to him, yet weirdly irresistible (955). Marya illuminates impulses within him he never knew he had, and shines a fresh light onto old truths he thought were settled:
With Sonya he had already made up a future picture, and it was all simple and clear, precisely because it was all invented, and he knew everything there was in Sonya; but with Princess Marya it was impossible for him to picture a future life, because he did not understand her, but only loved her.
Dreams about Sonya had something gay and toylike about them. But to think about Princess Marya was always difficult and a little frightening. (955)
Moved by his encounter with Marya at church, Nikolai returns to his quarters in Voronezh and does something we’ve seen him do on just one other occasion in the novel: he prays, only this time not for a wolf to come his way, but for a resolution to the agonizing predicament in which he currently finds himself. “ ‘What do I want? Freedom, release from Sonya. . . . No, I don’t love her as I should. My God! Lead me out of this terrible, hopeless situation!’ ” (955) At this moment his orderly Lavrushka comes barging in and hands him some mail, among which happens to be a letter from Sonya granting Nikolai the very freedom for which he was just praying! So astonished by the speediness with which God has answered his prayer, the flabbergasted Nikolai suspects that it must not have been the hand of God at all, but a matter of mere chance.
Well, which is it?
In the very next chapter Tolstoy reveals the circumstances under which Sonya wrote that letter: Traveling with the Rostovs during their evacuation, she has been receiving ever more pressure from the countess to show her respect for the family that brought her up by releasing poor Nikolai from his obligation. Utterly crushed, Sonya nevertheless finds some solace in the fact that Prince Andrei’s health appears to be improving, and his relations with Natasha rekindling. For if the two end up renewing their engagement and getting married, Sonya calculates, it would prevent Marya from marrying Nikolai, about whose encounter Sonya has just learned from Nikolai’s most recent letter. (At that time marriage between a brother-in-law and sister-in-law was forbidden by the Russian Orthodox Church.) And so, “with tears in her eyes and a joyful awareness of performing a magnanimous act, she wrote, interrupted several times by the tears that clouded her velvety black eyes, that touching letter, the reception of which so struck Nikolai” (960). It’s moments like this that make it, well, difficult to like Sonya. But the fact is, in spite of herself, she has unintentionally done a good thing. Her calculations about Andrei’s health will turn out to be wrong, just as by writing that less than entirely ingenuous letter, she manages to bring Nikolai and Marya even closer together. “[O]wing to this letter,” Tolstoy writes, “Nikolai and the princess were suddenly brought together in almost familial relations” (956).
A chance here, a chance there, and pretty soon things are starting to look a lot like destiny, aren’t they? What’s important, though, is how Nikolai has been responding to all those chances every step of the way. Had he not done what he did in Bogucharovo, not blurted out his feelings about Marya to the governor’s wife, not gone up to Marya in church, not been honest with himself during prayer about how he really feels about Sonya, it’s quite likely the concatenation of random occurrences might have remained just that: entirely random. Fate, Tolstoy has it, is what happens to us; destiny is what we do with it. By remaining open to life, then, by responding authentically and fully in every instance, Nikolai has been slowly transforming all of those instances of raw chance into, yes, destiny.
Tolstoy develops this idea more abstractly in the second epilogue, where he distinguishes the concept of freedom (svoboda) from that of will (volya). Freedom, he argues, is an illusion; our lives are inevitably dependent on a multitude of forces beyond our control or comprehension. We can, however, choose how we assert our will in each moment, and in so doing, unconsciously bring into being the larger, hidden design of which our lives are part. “Man lives consciously for himself,” Tolstoy writes, “but serves as an unconscious instrument for the achievement of historical, universally human goals” (605).
For Tolstoy’s nineteenth-century audience, taken by hero worship of all stripes, this was a rather unusual reframing of the concept of courage. But, then, there wasn’t anything typical about the way Russians defeated the French in 1812. Just as Nikolai, harnessing the swirling forces of change all around him, manifests his personal destiny moment by moment, so, too, Russia, absorbing blow after blow of an invading army, redirects that invasive energy to its own advantage. This rather backward sort of strength, so unlike the inflexible aggressiveness of their European foe, is precisely what allows Russia not only to defeat the French, but to transform the turmoil of 1812 into a moment of national self-awakening. Something rather similar happens with Nikolai, who comes to exhibit a unique sort of courage he never could have envisioned at the beginning of the book.
Nikolai meets Marya once again, more than a year later, in Moscow. Affairs in the Rostov family, in the winter of 1813, are now dire, and Nikolai is revolted by the thought of marrying a rich heiress, as his family has been pressuring him to do. So, when Marya calls on him at the small apartment the Rostovs have now been forced to rent, Nikolai is understandably embarrassed, distant, even cold. Marya leaves, convinced that she never really liked Nikolai in the first place. But another wiser, more intuitive voice deep within her suggests Nikolai is hiding something. A month and a half later, in the middle of winter, Nikolai calls on her again, initially carrying himself with what seems that same cold demeanor. But then something happens. Try as he might to hide behind whatever self-protective postures, the truth about his feelings suddenly breaks through in a moment of poignant, quintessentially Tolstoyan dialogue worth quoting in full. It is Princess Marya who speaks first here:
“I had become so close to you . . . and to your family, and I thought you would not consider my sympathy misplaced; but I was mistaken,” she said. Her voice suddenly quavered. “I don’t know why,” she went on, having composed herself, “you were different before and . . .”
“There are a thousand reasons why” (he placed special emphasis on the word why). “Thank you, Princess,” he said softly. “It’s sometimes hard.”
“So that’s why! That’s why!” an inner voice was saying in Princess Marya’s soul. “No, it wasn’t only that cheerful, kind, and open gaze, not only that handsome appearance that I loved in him; I guessed at his noble, firm, self-sacrificing soul,” she said to herself. “Yes, he’s poor now, and I’m rich . . . Yes, it’s only because of that . . . Yes, if it weren’t for that . . .” And, recalling his former tenderness and looking now at his kind and sad face, she suddenly understood the reason for his coldness.
“But why, Count, why?” she suddenly almost cried out involuntarily, moving towards him. “Why, tell me? You must tell me.” He was silent. “I don’t know your why, Count,” she went on. “But it’s hard for me, it’s . . . I’ll confess it to you. You want for some reason to deprive me of your former friendship. And that pains me.” There were tears in her eyes and in her voice. “There has been so little happiness in my life that every loss is hard for me . . . Forgive me, good-bye.” She suddenly began to weep and started out of the room.
“Princess, wait, for God’s sake!” he cried, trying to stop her. “Princess!”
She glanced back. For a few seconds they looked silently into each other’s eyes, and the distant and impossible suddenly became near, possible, and inevitable. . . . (1143–44)
What if Nikolai had held on to his pride? What if Marya hadn’t taken the risk of making herself vulnerable? By transcending their fears, both characters manage to reverse the outcome of a moment rapidly fading away. And their courage goes even deeper than this. In order for this moment to turn out the way it does, both Nikolai and Marya have to be ready to move beyond their former preconceptions to embrace new possibilities for their lives. Marya now realizes that she has the opportunity to lead precisely the spiritually rich sort of life she’s always cherished, without forgoing the more mundane pleasures of marriage and family life. Nikolai, for his part, discovers that he can do his duty to his financially strapped family and marry the woman he truly loves, that he can be both a man of honor and a man who remains true to his own wants and needs. Imagine that! Before the events of 1812, he himself most surely would not have been able to.
Even after his marriage to Marya and the death of his father, Nikolai will make yet another of his seemingly impetuous decisions when he disregards the counsel of some of his friends and relations who urge him to renounce his deceased father’s estate, as it will saddle him with unbearable debt. Yet bear that debt is exactly what he does, raising the necessary funds by taking a post in the civil service and borrowing money where he can. For the fiercely proud and independent Nikolai, these actions would have seemed as likely as begging for alms in the street. But by swallowing his aristocratic pride—by being one of the very sort of sellout “diplomats” he has always professed to abhor—Nikolai paradoxically shows himself to be the very aristocrat he has always wanted to be. He soon grows into an effective estate manager, and within three years amasses enough money not only to pay back all of his father’s debts, but to acquire another small estate, as well. It is precisely Nikolai’s newfound mix of pragmatism, then, combined with what remains of his youthful impulsiveness, that allows him to achieve the dream he has cherished since childhood—to be a man:
And—it must have been because Nikolai did not allow himself the thought that he was doing anything for others out of virtuousness—all that he did was fruitful: his fortune quickly increased; neighboring muzhiks came asking him to buy them; and long after his death, the pious memory of his management was preserved among the people. “He was a master . . . The muzhiks’ affairs first, and then his own. But he never went easy on us. In short—a master!” (1146)
“The ancients,” Tolstoy writes, “left us examples of heroic poems in which heroes constitute the entire interest of history, and we still cannot get used to the fact that, for our human time, history of this sort has no meaning” (754). What kind of history does have meaning, then? The sort Tolstoy models for us in War and Peace, in which courage isn’t a gift from the gods to a chosen few, but can manifest itself in any person, anytime, anywhere. This view actually places more of a burden of responsibility on each one of us, rather than less, for it says: No matter what army has invaded our country, what sorts of brutality surround us, what fears and doubts may beset us, we nevertheless retain the choice either to hide our heads, ostrichlike, in the wild, shifting sands of change, or else strive to build small sandcastles of goodness and meaning on whatever tiny plot of land we happen to find ourselves.